Weekend Reads | Our Need to Be Unique

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend's read is a recent research paper exploring humans' need to be unique. The study, led by Michigan State University psychology researchers, analyzed data collected over 20 years on how people rate their own need to be unique. They found that it consistently declined over those two decades.

Psychologists break down the need for uniqueness into three components: a lack of concern regarding others' reactions, a desire to not always follow the rules, and a willingness to publicly defend one's beliefs. In data collected from over 1.3 million internet participants between 2000 and 2020, all three of these metrics steadily declined. The most dramatic decline was in the willingness to defend one's beliefs, and the one that jumped around the most was a desire to not always follow the rules.

The data is pretty clear. What isn't clear is why the need for uniqueness has seen this kind of steady decline since the turn of the century. The researchers have no obvious answers, but they speculate on a diverse set of potential causes.

They begin by pointing out that humans have two often-conflicting needs: to be unique, and to belong and fit in with others. Each of us learns over time how important each of those is to us, and we make decisions about how to balance them. Some of us find a bit of both: a group of misfits within which we can share our uniqueness while also feeling like we belong. But many people also fear the reprisals and social isolation that can come with nonconformity. Indeed, studies have shown increases in both general and social anxiety across the population as a whole, which magnifies fear of social punishments and could lead to more pressure to quietly fit in.

In fact, the "spiral of silence" theory among social scientists proposes that people's willingness to speak out is directly tied to their beliefs about how broadly their opinion is shared. If you think your beliefs are widely held, you are more likely to share them; but the more you are convinced that your opinion is in the minority — and the fewer people you believe share it — the less willing you are to voice it.

It's unclear how social media has impacted this. On one hand, Twitter and other social media sites can be merciless to people who espouse fringe opinions, which can increase anxiety and discourage sharing of ideas. But on the other hand, social media also makes it easy to find like-minded people for almost any viewpoint, no matter how fringe — and that might give marginalized people a sense of belonging who otherwise might feel isolated and outnumbered.

Along those lines, the researchers throw out one more potential explanation: that people's need to be unique might be getting satisfied better now compared with 20 years ago because it's easier to "find your tribe" today — if not a set of people like ourselves, at least a social group where our individual brand of nonconformity is tolerated. Or, perhaps both the mainstream and social media are doing a better job of lifting up and celebrating individuals on the fringe, letting us all see that the group of people we have traditionally thought of as "normal" is a lot smaller than we knew. Perhaps that's the true, hidden value of Instagram and TikTok: making it OK to be fringe.

Changes in Need for Uniqueness From 2000 Until 2020

Featured image via Lee Yiu Tung/Shutterstock.com.